Pearl White - 27 May 1994

This has been a cliffhanger of a week in Washington, nothing like it since The Perils of Pauline.

By the way, I'm surprised to discover, a kind of surprise I'm experiencing all the time these days, to discover that there's a generation one representative anyway with greying hair who knew the phrase cliffhanger, had a vague sense of its meaning but did not know it's origin. It helps to know the origin of a vivid phrase. Once the original meaning is lost, word becomes vague, the idiom fades and if you're a writer you'd better stop using it.

I think of all the lively idioms I picked up when I first came here, all gone because the bright picture in the mind that they're meant to bring up has faded – a lead-pipe cinch, a four flusher. Nobody said "no problem", it was everything was hunky dory or everything's jake; people with a sniffle said they had the grippe.

Well "cliff-hanger" to me and a couple of generations after me, the word "cliffhanger" was a tap root into the memory of the valorous, invincible smashing blonde Pearl White. I can't remember anyone in my time paying tribute to Pearl White, so here's a little one. She was born in 1889, a farmer's daughter had a very early yen, as we used to say, for acting and played little Eva in Uncle Tom's cabin at the age of six, she then, well she didn't exactly turn professional, but her mother saw to it that she took the child's lead in any play that required one and she got paid for it. With those earnings she got a horse and by the age of 13 she was accomplished enough to be a daredevil rider in a circus, but two years later her career as an equestrian was over, she suffered a spinal injury in a fall from her horse.

She picked up parts, no longer a child, in travelling companies, failed to crash Broadway, which of course was her ambition and, assuming that that was the end of acting, glamour, stardom, fame and the rest became a secretary with a new kind of company. In 1912 about as modern and high tech as today's information highway, it was called a film company, very modest but, as we used to say, up to date, state of the art.

Luckily, this very attractive 22-year-old caught the eye, it says in her biography, of the company's director. I can already hear the sniggers suggesting anytime after the 1920s shenanigans at twilight and Peter Arno cartoons but in 1912 Pearl White was as pure, as we used to say, as the driven snow and Mr Golden the company director was, as we used to say, a gentlemen. He was making a three-reel Western, one reel longer than most Westerns, an ambitious project called The Life of Buffalo Bill who was, by the way, William Frederick Cody, still alive.

Mr Golden's leading lady in this epic fell ill, the new secretary in the days before résumés had let slip that she'd acted around the country in road companies, she got the part and the rest as we used to say is history, the star's part in over 100 comedies, Westerns mostly and most famously in adventure films. I doubt she ever made a movie longer than two reels and starting in 1914 made what was the most successful and best-known chapter film ever made – a chapter film, how about that another long-gone phrase, we call them serials.

And Pearl White when I was a boy was the serial queen. Now every performance of the early movies, silent of course, consisted of a big feature film, five, six reels, a news reel – no telly so you had to see car doors being opened and important men leaving the Foreign Office on the big screen instead of the little one. Then the real reason why anybody under 12 went to the pictures, as we used to say, the serial, each episode ended with a scene involving the hero, more often Pearl White, in hideous danger, more often than not actually hanging by her adorable fingernails from a cliff. The cinema pianist rattled off a crashing finale, the screen went dark, a great moan filled the theatre because that was all until next week. So, I said to conclude this touching memory, that to this day the film historians maintain there has never been not only in America but throughout the world a serial, a cinema chapter film that ever approached the popularity of Pearl White's Perils of Pauline.

So what, as Shakespeare said, is the conservancy? Well by an association you will recognise at once the word and the institution of cliffhanger was what immediately came to me when I thought I have to talk again about Dan Rostenkowski. How's that again? Wednesday morning's news was a shocker … let me briefly recount the plot so far. I said last time the most important man politician in America when a money bill has to go through Congress is the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he can kill the bill in committee, he can delay its going to the floor of the house, he can stifle it no matter how much the president – if it's his baby – wants it to survive. That famous committee is now in the thick of considering the president's health bill, the chairman is Mr Rostenkowski from Chicago. The bill especially, as the Clintons wanted, is almost certainly expiring, but a compromise supported by the great political skill of Mr Rostenkowski might get it through.

Well, unfortunately a grand jury has been sitting on Mr Rostenkowski on felony charges pocketing thousands of dollars in cash supposedly used to buy postage stamps, buying furniture for himself disguised as office necessities putting people on his regular payroll who did no work. We were waiting for the grand jury to wind up and report that yes there was or no there wasn't a case when Mr Rostenkowski's lawyers came forward and did a most extraordinary thing.

Evidently, they expected or knew that the grand jury would indict their client because they publicly asked the government prosecutors to overlook the big felony charges and allow him to plead guilty to minor charges, I can't remember that anything like that has ever happened. That's where we stood until Wednesday morning when and even a more brazen proposal was forthcoming from Mr Rostenkowski's lawyers, they promised that he would resign as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, hinted maybe even from Congress if the government would forget the main charges and get this, allow him to serve a short prison term on the minor ones, they find it too painful as he does to think of a long criminal trial and a long prison term. At last word, Mr Rostenkowski was dangling by his fingernails and so, of course, was the Health Bill.

Tune in next week or perhaps you'll have the luck of getting into a sneak preview of the dread outcome over the weekend.

Well this is just about as unprecedented as the case of Miss Paula Jones who has brought a suit against President Clinton for allegedly asking her to perform a sex act in a hotel room in Little Rock three years ago. The statute on sexual harassment has run out, so she is suing on more general grounds of humiliation and violation of her civil rights.

Now the president's lawyers I should say Bill Clinton's lawyers not the White House lawyers are at this moment very busy haunting the files scrutinising statutes to see if they can discover or engineer the argument that a president while in office is immune from defending a civil lawsuit. Presidents are, I ought to add, immune from civil liability while in office, but the Clinton lawyers want to say he's immune from any and all civil litigation as long as he's in office, they're saying in private, "Please Miss Jones, wait till he's back home in January 1997 or we'd rather hope in 2001". In public they're as much as saying "the president is in some things above the law". That is a fatal contention, it was the one made by President Nixon when a committee of Congress wanted the tapes of his office conversations. The Supreme Court decided they had to be made public. The Supreme Court enforced the general and correct constitutional belief that the president is not above the law, even Mr Nixon never suggested there should be a new law to give him such immunity while he was in office. At the moment, the prospect for such a law is not only bleak but politically perilous.

Well, if this weren't enough to prove we live in extraordinary times beyond the reach of satire, I can't imagine what I'm next going to tell you being an episode in one of the more far fetched and nasty comedies of the late Evelyn War. Gennifer Flowers – remember her? – she contended throughout the presidential campaign that she'd had an affair with the Governor of Arkansas name of Bill Clinton lasting, I think she said, 12 years.

Mr Clinton two summers ago when he was campaigning ducked this charge by saying that all marriages have their troubles, but his was good and stable to which Mrs Clinton warmly agreed. There are politicians who are still marvel at the adroitness of that feint, but now Miss Flowers is off around the United States doing what popular authors are required to do these days, what they call "flogging her book". Her book consists of two audio voice only cassettes of alleged conversations taped at the time between her and her alleged lover and there are the voices and there is one uncommonly like the voice of the President of the United States.

Sometimes I think I've died and landed up on another planet, enjoying or enduring what for want of a better word is called intelligent life, sometimes I think the next president of the United States is going to be Al Gore.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.